The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process. In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles. By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives. Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism. And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table. In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things. In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain. In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint. Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window. It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

March 19, 2013 by Nalina Moses

After seeing the rooms of the Winter Palace, two Leonardo da Vinci canvases, and twenty-six Rembrandt canvases, museum fatigue set in and I was ready to leave the Hermitage. Just then our guide dropped us off on the third floor, where the modern paintings are, and my energy level exploded. The thirty-seven small galleries here are crammed with pieces from Picasso, Chagall, Cezanne and other masters. They rival the selection of modern paintings on display at MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the heart of the collection are a number of groundbreaking works by Henri Matisse, including Dance and Red Room. Seeing Dance for the first time, after knowing it from reproductions, was convulsive. It’s huge, like a mural, and rendered in sour, unpretty reddish hues. Seen at this scale, practically life-size, the flatness of the rendering is incredibly brazen. It’s not pictorial really and not graphic really and yet it depicts a world that is, dramatically and spatially, complete. The canvas was coursing with energy, as if it would burst from the wall. (It would certainly benefit from being moved to a larger gallery.) My favorite Matisse was Game of Bowls, a smaller canvas that shows three boys playing on the lawn. The composition is simple, strange and calm. There is something primal about the means – smears of color – with which the boys are rendered, and with which their joy is captured. Standing in front, I felt the jolt that turn-of-the-century Parisians must have felt when encountering modern painting for the first time.

July 17, 2012 by Nalina Moses

It’s hard work being modern, and it must have been especially so for the Steins. Siblings Gertrude, Michael and Leo were middle-class Americans, heirs to a modest fortune, who moved to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century determined to find the future. They attended exhibitions, held salons, and amassed an astounding collection of early modern paintings by Matisse, Picasso and their contemporaries that’s on view now at the Met. Then, as a kind of coup de grace, the Steins commissioned what might be the most modern house ever, the Villa Garches by Le Corbusier.

Tucked deep inside the exhibit, in the corner of a small gallery, there’s a one-minute loop of vintage black and white film footage documenting the house. The clips (like everybody’s home movies, they’re tilted, jittery and out-of-focus) show kids running around in the yard and adults parading about in their finery rather than the house itself, which looks like a big, white spaceship that just landed behind them. The house still looks terrifically modern, a complex, idealized concoction of planes, ramps and ribbon windows. In the film footage the Steins, wearing heavy wools, hose and hats, look like Victorians lost in a future that’s not their own. Their foresight and fearlessness is remarkable.

April 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses